Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, The Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Tim Shipman,

plus Colladso of The Spectator. My usual sidekick, James Heel is off delving around, reporting his

noses in the weeds in the long grass. So I'm delighted today to be joined by Isabel Hardman, and it's good day to have her on because she is one of the most knowledgeable people that I know about public service reform. And today, Isabel, we have a big one, don't we? We have Bridget Philipson, not the most beloved Secretary of State in the government, but she has her big plans for special educational

needs and potential for a bit of controversy here. Talk us through what's going on.

Yeah, these are long-awaited reforms to the special educational needs and disability system

in this country, which, as well as being unsustainable in terms of costs, I think this is

a four billion pound overhaul.

Certainly that's what the government's badging it as.

As well as being very expensive, parents find it unwieldy to navigate.

They find it unpredictable.

And it's one of those things that MPs have been raising consistently for, well, well over a decade now as a broken system.

You know, it's a key constituent of their postbags.

It's something they spend a lot of time discussing with individual constituents in their surgeries.

And quite a few of them actually also have children themselves who have these

EHCP certificates, education, health and care plans for their own schooling. So it's something

that MPs have a very strong view on. And it's something that the Treasury has a very strong view on

as well. So the reforms that Bridget Philipson has been setting out this morning, she's been giving a speech in the Midlands. It will change the levels of support available to school children in England. So there will be two levels. There will be targeted, which is for all pupils in mainstream schools

and specialist, which is for children with the most complex needs. And those are the children

who will get these EHCPs in the future. They will only keep them until the next stage of

their education. So when they move from primary to secondary, secondary to sick form, sick form college and so on, they will be reassessed as they move. And that reassessment will begin in 2029. And there's also alongside the assessment and the eligibility for the plans and the debate around what constitutes a special educational need and whether that definition is widening

or whether we just have more children with higher needs, partly as a result of the pandemic.

There's also this huge debate around transport costs for SC&D school children, because I think

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